Google’s academic funding bought favorable research and enabled retaliation against critics

Evidence

In July 2017 the Wall Street Journal reported that since 2009, Google had actively sought out and provided funding to university professors for research and policy papers that support Google’s positions on matters related to law, regulation, competition, patents, and so forth. In many cases, Google weighed in on the papers before publication, and some of the authors did not disclose Google as a source of funding. Although Google publicly claimed that “the check came with no requirements,” another case in 2017 belied that notion. That summer, one of the New America Foundation’s most highly regarded scholars and a specialist in digital monopolies, Barry Lynn, posted a statement praising the EU’s historic decision to levy a $2.7 billion fine on Google as the result of a multiyear antitrust investigation. According to the New York Times and Lynn’s own account, New America’s director bent to pressure from Schmidt, firing Lynn and his Open Markets team of ten researchers. “Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling strings,” Lynn told the New York Times. “People are so afraid of Google now.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 404

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth probing how extensive undisclosed Google academic funding is across tech-antitrust scholarship, and whether similar patterns hold at other major platforms.
• XREF: Connects to Naomi Klein’s critique of corporate-funded climate denial and to literature on the tobacco industry’s science-funding playbook. — connects to: Buying academic influence predates the modern Koch era. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 650; Google executives dismissed resistance as ignorance and equated critics with authoritarians — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 448; Google funds think tanks to shape policy narratives in its favor — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 401 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Google funded far-right antiregulation groups and absorbed privacy advocates amid antitrust scrutiny #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 403